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ses eaux,

Appuyé d'une main sur son urne penchante,

S'endort au bruit flatteur de son onde naissante."

Whence if it is viewed sweeping in brilliant cataracts through many a mountain glen and many a woodland scene, until it glides from the realms of romance into the business of life, and forms the majestic boundary of two rival nations, conferring benefits on both -reflecting from the broad expanse of its waters anon the mellow vineyards of Johannisberg, anon the gorgeous turrets of Drachenfels-who could venture to foretell that so splendid an alliance of usefulness and grandeur was destined to be dissolved

that yon rich flood would never gain that ocean into whose bosom a thousand rivulets flow on with unimpeded gravitation, but would disappear in the quagmires of Helvoetsluys, be absorbed in the swamps of the Brabant, and lost in the sands of Holland?

Yet such is the course of the Rhine, and such was the destiny of Swift, of that man the outpourings of whose abundant mind fertilised alike the land of his fathers and the land of his birth: that man the very overflowings of whose strange genius were looked on by his contemporaries with delight, and welcomed as the inundations of the Nile are hailed by the men of Egypt.

A deep and hallowed motive impels me to select that last and dreary period of his career for the subject of special analysis; to elucidate its secret history, and to examine it in all its bearings; eliminating conjecture and substituting fact; prepared to demolish the visionary superstructure of hypothesis, and to place the matter on its simple basis of truth and reality.

It is far from my purpose and far from my heart to tread on such solemn ground save with becoming awe and feet duly unshodden. If, then, in the following pages, I dare to unseal the long-closed well, think not that I seek

to desecrate the fountain: if it devolves on me to lift the veil, fear not that I mean to profane the sanctuary: tarry until this paper shall have been perused to its close; nor will it fall from your grasp without leaving behind it a conviction that its contents were traced by no unfriendly hand, and by no unwarranted biographer: for if a bald spot were to be found on the head of Jonathan Swift, the hand of Andrew Prout should be the first to cover it with laurels.

There is a something sacred about insanity: the traditions of every country agree in flinging a halo of mysterious distinction around the unhappy mortal stricken with so sad and so lonely a visitation. The poet who most studied from nature and least from books, the immortal Shakespeare, has never made our souls thrill with more intense sympathy than when his personages were brought before us bereft of the guidance of reason. The grey hairs of King Lear are silvered over with additional veneration when he raves; and the wild flower of insanity is the tenderest that decks the pure garland of Ophelia. We know that among rude and untutored nations madness is of rare occurrence, and its instances few indeed. But though its frequency in more refined and civilised society has taken away much of the deferential homage paid to it in primitive times, still, in the palmiest days of Greek and Roman illumination, the oracles of Delphi found their fitting organ in the frenzy of the Pythoness: and through such channels does the Latin lyrist represent the Deity communicating with man :

"quatit

Mentem sacerdotum incola Pythius." But let us look into our own breasts, and acknowledge that, with all the fastidious pride of fancied superiority, and in the full plenitude of our undimmed reason, we cannot face the breathing ruin of a noble intellect undismayed. The broken sounds, the vague intensity of that gaze, those whisperings that seem to commune with the world of spirits, the play of those features, still impressed with the signet of immortality, though illegible to our eye, strike us with that awe which the obelisk of the desert, with

* Swift was a natural son of Sir William Temple.

its insculptured riddles, inspires into the Arabian shepherd. An oriental opinion makes such beings the favourites of heaven: and the strong tincture of eastern ideas, so discernible on many points in Ireland, is here also perceptible; for a born idiot among the offspring of an Irish cabin is prized as a family palladium.

To contemplate what was once great and resplendent in the eyes of man, slowly mouldering in decay, has never been an unprofitable exercise of thought; and to muse over reason itself, fallen and prostrate, cannot fail to teach us our complete dependency. If to dwell among ruins and amid sepulchres — to explore the pillared grandeur of the tenantless Palmyra, or the crumbling wreck of that Roman amphitheatre once manned with applauding thousands and rife with joy, now overgrown with shrubs and haunted by the owl—if to soliloquise in the valley where autumnal

“Animula, vagula, blandula,
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quæ nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nec ut soles dabis jocos!"

Nor unloath am I to confess that such contemplations have won upon me in the decline of years. Youth has its appropriate pursuits and to him who stands on the threshold of life, with all its gaieties and festive hours spread in alluring blandishment before him, such musings may come amiss, and such studies may offer no attraction. We are then eager to mingle in the crowd of active existence, and to mix with those who swarm and jostle each other on the molehill of this world

"Towered cities please us then, And the busy hum of men." But to me, numbering fourscore years, and full tired of the frivolities of modern wisdom, metaphysical inquiry returns with all its charms, fresh as when first I courted, in the halls of Sorbonne, the science of the soul. On this barren hill where my lot is fallen, in that "sunset of life" which is said to "bring mystical lore," I love to investigate subjects such as these. "And may my lamp at midnight hour Be seen in some high lonely tower, Seeking with Plato to unfold What realms or what vast regions hold Th' immortal soul that hath forsook Its mansion in this fleshy nook.

leaves are thickly strewn, ever reminding us by their incessant rustle, as we tread the path, "that all that's bright must fade"-if these things beget that mood of soul in which the suggestions of heaven find readiest adoption,--how forcibly must the wreck of mind itself, and the mournful aberrations of that faculty by which most we assimilate to our Maker, humble our self-sufficiency, and bend down our spirit in adoration! It is in truth a sad bereavement, a dissevering of ties long cherished, a parting scene melancholy to witness, when the ethereal companion of this clay takes its departure, an outcast from the earthly coil that it once animated with intellectual fire, and wanders astray, cheerless and friendless, beyond the picturings of poetry to describe; --a picture realised in Swift, who more than Adrian was entitled to exclaim:

"Wie soul, fond rambler, whither, say-
Whither, boon comrade, flee'st away?
1ll can'st thou bear the bitter blast-
Houseless, unclad, affright, aghast :
Jocund no more! and hush'd the mirth
That gladdened oft the sons of earth!"

And may at length my weary age
Find out some peaceful hermitage,
'Till old experience doth attain
To something like prophetic strain!"

To fix the precise limits where sober reason's well-regulated dominions end, and at what bourne the wild region of the fanciful commences, extending in many a tract of lengthened wilderness until it joins the remote and volcanic territory of downright insanity, were a task which the most deeply-read psychologist might attempt in vain.

Το

settle the exact confines would be a hopeless endeavour; for nowhere is there so much debatable ground, so much unmarked frontier, so much undetermined boundary. The degrees of longitude and latitude have never been laid down, nor, that I learn, ever calculated at all, for want of a really sensible solid man to act the part of a first meridian. The same remark is applicable to a kindred subject, viz. that state of the human frame akin to insanity, and called intoxication; for there are here also various degrees of intensity; and where on earth (except perhaps in the person of my friend Dick Dowden) will you find κατα φρενα και κατα θυμον a sober man, according with the de

--

scription in a hymn of our church
liturgy?

"Qui pius, prudens, humilis, pudicus,
Sobriam duxit sine labe vitam,
Donec humanos levis afflat aurà

Spiritus ignes."

Ex officio Brev. Rom. de communi Conf. non
Pont. ad vesperas.

I remember well, when in 1815 the present Lord Chancellor (then simple Harry Brougham) came to this part of the country (attracted hither by the fame of our Blarney-stone), having had the pleasure of his society one summer evening in this humble dwelling, and conversing with him long and loudly on the topic of inebriation. He had certainly taken a drop extra, but perhaps was therefore better qualified for debating the subject, viz., at what precise point drunkenness sets in, and what is the exact low-water mark. He first advocated a three-bottle system, but enlarged his view of the question as he went on, until he reminded me of those spirits described by Milton who sat apart on a hill retired, discussing free-will, fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute,

"And found no end, in wandering mazes
lost!"

My idea of the matter was very sim-
ple, although I had some trouble in
bringing him round to the true under-
standing of things; for he is obstinate
by nature, and, like the village school-
master, whom he has sent "abroad,"
"Even though vanquished, he can argue
still."

I shewed him that the poet Lucretius,
in his elaborate work De Naturá Re-
rum, had long since established a cri-

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terion, or standard-a sort of clepsydra, to ascertain the final departure of sobriety,-being the well-known phenomenon of reduplication in the visual orb, that sort of second sight common among the Scotch :

"Bina lucernarum flagrantia lumina flammis,

Et duplices hominum vultus et corpora
bina!"-Lucretius.

But, unfortunately, just as I thought I
had placed my opinions in their most
luminous point of view, I found that
poor Harry was completely fuddled,
so as to be unconscious of all I could
urge during the rest of the evening; for,
as Tom Moore says in Lalla Rookh,
"the delicate chain
Of thought once tangled, could not clear
again."

It has long ago been laid down as a maxim by Aristotle, that "nullum magnum ingenium sine mixturá insaniæ.” Newton was decidedly mad when he wrote his comment on Revelations ; Descartes went off in a brain fever; Mallebranche lost his reason long before he died; Burns was more than once labouring under delirium; Tasso was acquainted with the cells of a madhouse; Nathaniel Lee,* the dramatist, when a tenant of Bedlam, wrote a tragedy twenty-five acts long; and Sophocles was accused before the tribunal of the gargia, and only acquitted of insanity by the recitation of his Edip. Colon. Pascal was an occasional hypochondriac; the poet Cowper and the philosopher Rousseau were subject to lunacy; Luis de Camoens died raving in an hospital at Lisbon; and, in an hospital at Madrid, the same fate, with

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Note by Prout: "This fact concerning Lee I stumbled on in that singular olla podrida, the Curiosities of Literature, by D'Israeli, a man after my own heart. As I have, though personally unknown to this learned pundit, a high regard for his deep and searching erudition, I wish he could be induced to visit the "Blarney stone and my "book-case at Watergrasshill. Since the great Cornelius à Lapide, there never rose a more multifarious and elaborate commentator. In his chapter on the nedicine of the mind (vol. i. second series, Murray, 1823), I find a passage which tells for my theory; and I therefore insert it here, on the principle of je prends mon bien partout où je le trouve. Plutarch says in one of his essays, that should the body sue the mind in a court of judicature for damages, it would be found that the mind would prove to have been a most ruinous tenant to its landlord.' This idea so tickled my fancy, that I hunted for it through all the metaphysical writings of the Baotian sage; and lo! I find that Democritus, the laughing philosopher, was the real Simon Pure who first made the assertion, retailed by him of Cheronæa : Οίμαι μαλιστα τον Δημοκριτον είπειν, ως ει το σωμα δικασαιτο τη ψυχή, κακώσεως ουκ αν αυτην αποφυγείν. And Theophrastus enlarges on the same topic. Θεοφραστος αληθές είπεν, πολύ τῷ σώματι τελειο ενοίκιον την ψυχην. Πλείονα μεντοι το σώμα της ψυχης απολαύει κακα, μη κατα λόγον αυτω χρωμενος. See the magnificent edition of Plutarch's moral treatises, from the Clarendon press of Oxford, 1795, in the British Museum, being ПAoît. Ta Heika. Tom. i. p. 375.

the same attendant madness, closed the career of the author of Don Quixote, the immortal Miguel Cervantes. Shelley was mad outright; and Byron's blood was deeply tainted with maniacal infusion. His uncle, the eighth lord, had been the homicide of his kindred, and hid his remorse in the quaint cloisters of Newstead. He himself enumerates three of his maternal ancestors who died by their own hands. Last February (1830), Miss Milbanke, in the book she has put forth to the world, states her belief and that of her advisers, that "the Lord Byron was actually insane." And in Dr. Millingen's book (the surgeon of the Suliote brigade) we find these words attributed to the childe: "I picture myself slowly expiring on a bed of torture, or terminating my days, like Swift, a grinning idiot."*

Strange to say, few men have been more exempt from the usual exciting causes of insanity than Swift. If ambition, vanity, avarice, and the fury of sexual passion, be the ordinary determining agents of lunacy, then should he have proudly defied the approaches

of the evil spirit and withstood his attacks. As for ambitious cravings, it is well known that he sought not the smiles of the court, nor ever sighed for ecclesiastical dignities. Though a churchman, he had none of the crafty, aspiring, and intriguing mania of a Wolsey or a Mazarin. By the boldness and candour of his writings, he effectually put a stop to that ecclesiastical preferment which the low-minded, the cunning, and the hypocrite, are sure to obtain and of him it might be truly said, that the doors of clerical promotion closed while the gates of glory opened.

But even glory (mystic word!), has it not its fascinations, too powerful at times even for the eagle eye of genius, and capable of dimming for ever the intellectual orb that gazes too fixedly on its irradiance? How often has splendid talent been its own executioner, and the best gift of Heaven supplied the dart that bereft its possessor of all that maketh existence valuable? The very intensity of those feelings which refine and elevate the soul, has it not been found to operate the work of ruin?

""Twas thine own genius gave the final blow,
And helped to plant the wound that laid thee low.
So the struck eagle, stretched upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
Views his own feather on the fatal dart
Which winged the shaft that quivers in his heart.
Keen are his pangs; but keener far to feel

He nursed the pinion that impelled the steel :
While the same plumage that had warmed his nest
Drinks the last lifedrop of his bleeding breast!"

So Byron sings in his happiest mood; and so had sung before him a young
French poet, who died in early life, worn out by his own fervour :

"Oui, l'homme ici bas aux talents condamné,

Sur la terre en passant sublime infortuné,
Ne peut impunément achever une vie

Que le ciel surchargea du fardeau du genie!
Souvent il meurt brulé de ces célestes feux...

Tel quelquefois l'oiseau du Souverain des Dieux,
L'aigle, tombe du haut des plaines immortelles,

Brulé du foudre ardent qu'il portait sous ses ailes!"-CHENEDOLLÉ.

I am fully aware that in Swift's case there was a common rumour among his countrymen in Ireland at the time, that overstudy and too much learning had disturbed the equilibrium of the doctor's brain, and unsettled the equipoise of his cerebellum. The "most noble" Festus, who was a wellbred Italian gentleman, fell into the

same vulgar error long ago with respect to St. Paul, and opined that much literature had made of him a madman! But surely such a sad confusion of materialism and spiritualism as that misconception implies, will not require a refutation. The villagers in Goldsmith's beautiful poem may have been excusable for adopting so unscientific

Anecdotes of Byron's Illness and Death, by Julius Millingen, p. 120.

London.

a theory, but beyond the sphere of rustic sages the hypothesis is intolerable :

"And still they gazed, and still their wonder grew

That one small head could carry all he knew!"

How can the ethereal and incorporate stores of knowledge become a physical weight, and turn out an encumbrance, exercising undue pressure on the human brain? how can mental acquirement be described as a body ponderous? What folly to liken the crevices of the cerebral gland to the fissures in an old barn bursting with the riches of a collected harvest-rupuerunt horrea messes—or to the crazy bark of old Charon, only fitted for the light waftage of ghosts when it received the bulky personage of the Eneid.

"Gemuit sub pondere cymba Sutilis, ac multam accepit rimosa paludem."

Away with such fantasies! The more learned we grow the better organised is our mind, the more prejudices we shake off; and the stupid error which I combat is but a pretext and consolation for ignorance.

The delusions of love swayed not the stern mind of the Dean of St. Patrick, nor could the frenzy of passion ever overshadow his clear understanding. Like a bark gliding along a beautiful and regular canal, the soft hand of woman could, with a single riband, draw him onward in a fair and well-ordered channel; but to drag him out of his course into any devious path, it was not in nature nor the most potent fascination to accomplish. Stella, the cherished

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panion of his life, his secretly wedded bride, ever exercised a mild influence over his affections

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severe and uncompromising tenets of monogamy to Dr. Primrose, vicar of Wakefield; that being the next best state to the one which I have adopted myself, in accordance with the Platonic philosophy of Virgil, and the example of Paul:

"Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat : Quique pii vates, et Phobo digna locuti : Omnibus his niveâ cinguntur tempora vittâ!"-Eneid, 6.

The covetousness of this world had no place in the breast of Swift, and never, consequently, was his mind liable to be shaken from its basis by the inroads of that overwhelming vice avarice. Broad lands and manorial possessions he never sighed for; and, as Providence had granted him a competency, he could well adopt the resignation of the poet, and exclaim, Nil amplius oro. Nothing amused him more than the attempt of his friend Doctor Delany to excite his jealousy by the ostentatious display of his celebrated villa, which, as soon as purchased, he invited the dean to come and admire. We have the humorous lines of descriptive poetry which were composed by Swift on the occasion, and were well calculated to destroy the doctor's vanity. The estate our satirist represents as liable to suffer an eclipse of the sun whenever" a or other small opaque body minary. The plantations " might posshould pass between it and that lusibly supply a toothpick ;"

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"And the stream that's called 'Meander' Might be sucked up by a gander!"

Such were the sentiments of utter derision with which he contemplated the territorial aggrandisement so dear to the votaries of Mammon; nor is it foreign from this topic to remark, that the contrary extreme of hopeless poverty not having ever fallen to his lot, one main cause of insanity in high minds was removed. Tasso went mad through sheer distress and its concomitant shame; the fictions of his romantic love for a princess of the court of Ferrara are all fudge: he had at one time neither fire nor a decent coat to his back, and he tells us that, having no lamp in his garret, he resorted to his cat to lend him the glare of her eyes. "Non avendo candele per iscrivere i suoi versi!"

Intemperance and debauchery never

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